One thing I think you may have overlooked in some of these examples though is the role of text labels as pre-attentive “signposts” for content.

This is a rather subtle point, but simply put, it often doesn’t matter what a label _says_ but rather, where it appears. Eye-tracking and other studies show that people usually don’t read labels unless they are confused by the content they prefix. Instead, the label can act as a sort of bullet point, or a sub-concious “container” for the data associated with it. It’s a bit like lyrics in songs: read them out loud without the music and they are usually completely awful, but they are not written as poetry. At least, that’s what’s happening in your Expedia home page example, which has been the subject of more eye-tracking, qualitative and quantitative multi-variate testing than you can possibly believe! ;-)